Hey, it works! I moved my blog from using Movable Type over to WordPress. I had two reasons for wanting to do this.
First, I wanted a link at the bottom of the main page to older posts. This seems trivial, but Movable Type builds static pages so it’s a lot of work to get it to do that. WordPress serves up pages dynamically (meaning each page is created when it’s requested) so it’s easy. I don’t get enough traffic to need the performance increase that MT’s static pages give you, and if I did I’d set up caching to handle it.
Second, and even more significantly, I like the direct php access to WordPress templates. MT uses their own Template Tags which makes their templates easier to read but harder to customize. MT allows you to include php in the pages, but I would have had to change all the URLs to end in .php rather than .html which I really don’t like. Yeah, you can rewrite those in Apache but ugh. WP’s templates are all in php, so getting into them is easy, making integration into the rest of my site very simple.
As promised on WP’s site, it was fast and easy to install WP and import all my MT posts. Maybe 10 minutes. I spent a lot more time than that working on the templates (which is still a work in process).
Finally, I changed the URL from ‘weblog’ to just ‘blog’ – really, what was I thinking before??? I also did some Apache rewrites so that old links aren’t broken.